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Architectural Iconoclast Wins the Pritzker Prize

Toyo Ito, a Japanese architect who broke from Modernism and designed a library that survived his country’s catastrophic 2011 earthquake, was awarded his profession’s top honor, the Pritzker Architecture Prize, on Sunday.

“Toyo Ito is a creator of timeless buildings, who at the same time boldly charts new paths,” the Pritzker jury said in its citation. “His architecture projects an air of optimism, lightness and joy and is infused with both a sense of uniqueness and universality.”

In a telephone interview Mr. Ito, 71, said he was gratified by the honor, especially because it represents an acceptance of his position as an iconoclast who has challenged the past 100 years of Modernism.

“I’ve been thinking that Modernism has already reached to the limit or a dead end,” Mr. Ito said through an interpreter. “I didn’t expect this surprising news, and I’m very happy about it.”

Nicolai Ouroussoff, then the architecture critic of The New York Times, remarked in 2009 that Mr. Ito had repeatedly been passed over for the Pritzker “in favor of designers with much thinner résumés.”

Mr. Ito will receive the award at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston on May 29.

Looking back over his career Mr. Ito said he is particularly proud of the Sendai Mediatheque, his library completed in Sendai, Japan, in 2001. The building’s design is dominated by structural tubes that support the floor plates and provide circulation, pathways that the Pritzker jury said “permitted new interior spatial qualities.”

But Mr. Ito is also proud of the building’s significance as a project that was meant to withstand an earthquake. (It won a Golden Lion Award at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.) A video of the inside of the building taken by someone under a table during the earthquake in 2011 went viral.

“The building shook and swayed violently; everything cascaded from shelves and desks onto the floor,” the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “Ceiling panels appeared to swing drunkenly overhead. But the Mediatheque did not collapse. It stood firm against the massive seismic forces that were tearing other buildings apart; the basic structure did not fail.”

Mr. Ito has been active in the recovery effort. He recruited three young architects to help him develop the concept of Home-for-All, communal space for survivors. In his book “Toyo Ito: Forces of Nature,” edited by Jessie Turnbull and published last year by Princeton Architectural Press, Mr. Ito writes, “An architect is someone who can make such places for meager meals show a little more humanity, make them a little more beautiful, a little more comfortable.”

Photo

Toyo Ito

The citation said Mr. Ito consistently couples his personal creative agenda with a sense of public responsibility. “It is far more complex and riskier to innovate while working on buildings where the public is concerned,” the jury said, “but this has not deterred him.”

Though perhaps not as well known as architects like Rem Koolhaas or Frank Gehry, Mr. Ito rose to prominence with the completion of his stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, built for the World Games in 2009.

And he has received his share of awards, including, in 2010, the Praemium Imperiale, which recognizes lifetime achievement in areas of the arts not covered by the Nobel Prizes.

But Mr. Ito said he doesn’t worry about status or architecture competitions. “We cannot predict what we will win or we won’t win,” he said.

He said he just needs to be able to do the work he wants to do. These days that includes flatware, called Mu, introduced in Paris by the Italian company Alessi. Mu means six in Japanese and refers to the six-sided shape of the handles, which resemble chopsticks. The pattern complements Ku, the porcelain service Mr. Ito created for Alessi in 2006.

He has also been drawn to practical retail projects like a building for Tod’s, the Italian shoe and handbag company, and the facade of the Mikimoto Ginza 2 flagship store — both in Tokyo. And he continues to design ambitious public projects like the Taichung opera house, whose porous exterior has been likened to a gigantic sponge, and the Tama Art University Library, an irregular grid of concrete arches.

Born to Japanese parents in Keijo — now Seoul — in 1941, Mr. Ito moved to Tokyo in junior high school and then attended the University of Tokyo, where architecture became his main interest. He went on to graduate in 1965 and began working at the firm of Kiyonori Kikutake & Associates. In 1971 he left to start his own studio, calling it Urban Robot (Urbot), which in 1979 became Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects.

Many of his early works were residences — including one in a Tokyo suburb called “Aluminum House,” which consisted of a wooden frame completely covered in aluminum, and a home for his sister called “White U,” which generated considerable interest in his work.

Throughout his career, Mr. Ito said, he has tried to establish a connection between inside and the outside conditions, an effort evident in his lightweight structures that use materials like mesh, perforated aluminum and permeable fabrics.

That fluidity pervades projects like his World Games stadium, critics said, which do not conform to conventional definitions of modern architecture.

“It reflects his longstanding belief that architecture, to be human, must somehow embrace seemingly contradictory values,” Mr. Ouroussoff wrote in his review of the building. “Instead of a self-contained utopia, he offers us multiple worlds, drifting in and out of focus like a dream.”

Correction: March 19, 2013

An article on Monday about the winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, Toyo Ito, misspelled the given name of the editor of the book “Toyo Ito: Forces of Nature.” She is Jessie Turnbull, not Jesse. The article also referred imprecisely to the Japanese word “mu,” which is also the name of flatware designed by Mr. Ito with handles in a six-sided shape. It means six, not hexagon.

A version of this article appears in print on March 18, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Architectural Iconoclast Wins the Pritzker Prize. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe